Rugd1022

Head (The Porpoise Song) - The Monkees

Hold On Tight To Your Dreams - ELO

We Have All The Love In The World - Louis Armstrong

It Only Takes A Minute Girl - Take That

As the years roll slowly by the otherwise forgotten '80s and '90s Masers are gaining in popularity, perhaps not as much as other marques but they do have their followers.

I hadn't really given this thread much thought but thumbing through one of my (by now very grubby!) Maserati books and perusing Autotrader recently it struck me that the firms fifth iteration of the Quattroporte falls into the right category, in fact one overseas magazine called it an instant classic from Pinifarina when it was launched in 2003. It's certainly much prettier than the revamped QPVI of 2014 onwards. I'm still hankering after one, preferably a 2007 'pre-facelift' model with the much improved ZF auto'box and (vital) fully documented service history. There are some subtle variations in the front grille and other bits of trim and being quite large they can be colour sensitive cars (unusually for an Italian machine they don't look that great in bright red), but I just love the lines, the unfussy detailing and that Ferrari derived V8 engine... I'm even quite partial to the Gandini designed earlier MkIV version...

That Minx / caravan combo looks very cute . More old school stuff... Mark Knopfler's beautiful 1957 Maserati 300S, perhaps he has the same affection for Maserati that Chris Rea does for Ferrari...?

Somewhere on youtube there are some very grainy b&w clips of Jochen Rindt being interviewed shortly before he died in 1970 along with a couple of other drivers and hangers on, it veers from English to German and bits of Italian and back again. Very enjoyable to watch, but it sometimes makes me feel a bit of a luddite for not paying more attention at school!

Gentle On My Mind - Dean Martin

'Behind enemy lines'... a Maserati Merak sits outside the Cavallino restaurant right opposite the Ferrari factory in Maranello in the early '70s...

Milano, Porta Genova...

It's definitely Rugby Central Jonny, 35030 is on the down main / northbound line. Rather a lovely photo by the way!

The 'rare loco' thing was massive amongst bashers of a certain persuasion back then when BR still had about three and a half thousand locos on its books. The likes of 37 205 doesn't sound 'rare' now, but for our lot living under the wires of the WCML anything off region was pounced on and the word spread around if possible. I remember one afternoon in late '82 when 37 217 turned up at Rugby on the daily Toton - Bilton Cement Works coal tripper, much frothing on platform 2 ensued while it ran round and departed north again with the empties, looking positively exotic. This was brought home to me yesterday when walking down past Crewe Diesel Depot towards Basford Hall Yard, on the shed were a 37 and a pair of 20s all in BR 'banger' blue, quite a sight these days amongst all the franchised liveries we have now.

Photo c/o Anthony Gregory, Saltley BOP in the '70s...

Deleted.

Milan..

Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple

Great idea for a thread - apologies for the awful scans but I thought I'd post these (again) from the 'Yorkshire Pudden' railtour I was on back on 4th April 1983, a mish mash of traction from Plymouth to Yorkshire and back featuring a 50 on the first leg to Bristol (which I can't find my photos of) a pair of 33s from there to Derby, a pair of 25s from there to somewhere in Yorkshire where 40 068 took over for the final leg into Bradford Exchange... it was a bit of a marathon weekend for me and my mate, we finished our secondman turns at Stonebridge Park the day before, made our way down to Plymouth on a HST, kipped in the waiting room there until the following morning, did the tour up to Yorkshire and back down to Devon intending to bail out at Exeter rather than go all the way back to Plymouth, but we fell asleep and woke up at Newton Abbot, all these years later I have no recollection of how we got back up to London...

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage - Ennio Morricone

More pics of the 450S taken on the same day and a couple of recent ones...

Mike's posting of those lovely photos reminds me I saw a pair of Cortinas on the A5 just south of Rugby this afternoon on the way home from the DIRFT shunt job, a red F reg'd Mk2 two door and a black Y reg'd MkV which must have been one of the last made / registered, it also had an odd looking 'XR6' badge on the bootlid.

General consensus seems to be that it's the loom and its installation, it was designed for another car (a Merc of some sort I think) and opening the tailgate stretches and pinches it at a certain point. It's very common on Giuliettas but as far as I'm aware doesn't affect the smaller Mito. Just got back from work, sat down with a cuppa, time for a bit of blatant Italianate nostalgia... the last photo is the one off Maserati 450S Zagato built by Frank Costin in 1957 on a 1956 convertible chassis, pictured in the factory yard, there's a railway line behind the fence apparently...

Italian thinking definitely came into it somewhere, the loom in question wasn't actually designed to go into the Giulietta but was, er 'made to fit'! One of the Alfa forums is full of people complaining about specific electrical gremlins in the Giulietta, the worst of which is where the loom goes into the tailgate and 'pinches' every time you open or close it, causing the central locking to start playing silly beggars. Mine started doing this three years ago and shows no sign of putting itself right, despite a trip to the nearest Alfa dealer In Nuneaton. That said, the car itself is fine, it's red, it's Italian and has caramel coloured leather seats.... it's just a pity it sounds like a JCB! Despite all their faults, perceived or real, I'm still massively drawn to old Italian stuff, they really do get under your skin of you let them. I remember playing Top Trumps with a mate in the '70s and drooling over the small grainy pictures of various Alfas and the Lancia Stratos..... oh my...

'Jay Leno often mentions electrics when talking about his or other owner's Italian cars - when he restored his '69 Lamborghini Espada he found a spaghetti like maze of wires in the sills with no insulation on some of them, they were installed that way in the factory! As I alluded to above, many Italian classics will have been properly restored by now with new or repaired wiring looms, my neighbours recently restored Fiat X1/9's electrics are in better shape than my six year old Alfa Giulietta which has a re-occurring fault with the German supplied wiring loom.